Simple Photo Gallery

Create beautiful photo galleries from collections in just 30 seconds. No configuration required to get started—simply run two commands in your photos folder and create a static gallery website you can self-host.

This is a free, open-source tool that you can use to generate galleries and self-host them. If you don't want to use the command line or bother with self-hostting, please check out simple.photo for a hosted solution.

Example Gallries

More examples

• California Road Trip
• Visiting Australia
• Discovering Japan

Features

📸 Automatically scan directories with photos and videos
📝 Show descriptions for photos and videos
📂 Divide the gallery into sections to tell a story
🖼️ Create optimized thumbnails for fast loading
🎥 Play videos directly in the gallery
📱 Generate galleries that work on all devices
⚡ Optimized to be fast and lightweight
🔧 Generate a static HTML gallery that you can self-host

Quick Start

To create a gallery you need to install he simple-photo-gallery package globally and then you can use the spg command:

npm install -g simple-photo-gallery@latest
spg init
spg build

Alternatively you can use npx to run the commands directly:

npx simple-photo-gallery@latest init
npx simple-photo-gallery@latest build

This will:

1. Install the simple-photo-gallery package from NPM (if you don't already have it)
2. Prompt you for your gallery title, description, and header image
3. Scan your photos and create a gallery.json file
4. Generate optimized thumbnails
5. Build a static HTML gallery that you can open in your browser and self-host

Installation Requirements

• Node.js 20+ - Download here
• FFmpeg (for video support) - Install via:
  • macOS: brew install ffmpeg
  • Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install ffmpeg
  • Windows: Download from ffmpeg.org

Supported Formats

Images: JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF
Videos: MP4, MOV, AVI, WebM, MKV

Detailed Documentation

For advanced usage, customization, and deployment options, see the comprehensive documentation:

• Commands Reference - Detailed guide for all CLI commands
  • init - Initialize new galleries
  • build - Generate static HTML galleries
  • thumbnails - Generate optimized thumbnails
  • clean - Remove gallery files
• Gallery Configuration - Manual editing of gallery.json and advanced features like sections
• Deployment Guide - Guidelines for hosting your gallery

Telemetry

Simple Photo Gallery collects optional anonymised usage telemetry to help us understand which features are the most helpful and to prioritise improvements. No personal data or information about your photos is collected. You need to opt-in the first time you use a command for telemetry to be collected. When the CI or DO_NOT_TRACK environment variables are set, telemetry is disabled.

You can manage telemetry at any time:

spg telemetry -s 0   # opt out of telemetry
spg telemetry -s 1   # opt back in

Every command also accepts --telemetry 0 or --telemetry 1 to temporarily override your global preference.

For more information about what data is collected please visit the telemetry page.

Python Version

The old Python version of Simple Photo Gallery V1 is still available here, but is now deprecated.

License

Simple Photo Gallery is licensed under the MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.